In the day’s next entry, timed 6.32 p.m., their grandfather had described going up the ‘Floibanen or funicular railway’ where he’d met an Australian tourist and enquired after her name, maiden name, occupation and address. (Mrs Freida Moyle. Miss Freida Walker. Calculator Bookkeeping Machine Expert. 20 Queen Street, Melbourne.) ‘Beautiful view of Bergen,’ he’d jotted down then, just before noting the ticket fare: ‘1.50 Kr each return. 3.00 Kr two persons.’
But for these diaries, passed down to his brother, Vaughan would have known nothing of his grandfather’s inner life – and of how much more than blood they shared.
He thought of his grandfather’s father who had launched the family business in the 1870s. His great-grandfather had left a rural hamlet for Swansea to set up as a wholesale grocer and butter merchant. Between father and enterprising son, the name of Richards had traded proudly in the city for a hundred years. Vaughan liked to think that certain autistic traits – tremendous focus, attention to specifics, imaginative somersaults – had played their part in the family’s flourishing.
His mother had not inherited her father’s strange mind. It seemed to Vaughan that there was more Richards in him than in his grandfather’s eldest daughter. A chatty woman, his mother, always at ease with herself and other people and leery of spending much time alone. It was possible that her son’s inwardness and intense gaze intimidated her. Chatty as she was, she never opened up to him. Or maybe, just maybe, she had, or had tried, and he’d simply not understood.
There were times as a boy he’d wanted her to assuage the distress, the confusion, inside him with a well-chosen sentence. He’d wanted her to make everything clear in his head so that he might breathe more easily. But the times were flat against that; very few people talked about feelings in the fifties, the early sixties. Except perhaps the gossips. Language back then was strictly policed. Always you minded your language, watched your p’s and q’s.
When Vaughan turned nine the distance between mother and son grew miles wider. He became a boarder at a free independent school for fatherless boys in Hertfordshire. Yearround he lodged there till he went up to Edinburgh at eighteen, returning to his family only for the long school holidays.
One summer, he returned to an empty house. He was twelve or perhaps thirteen. The holidays hadn’t arrived yet in Walton-on-Thames and he walked to the school where his mother taught. She left the blackboard and told him to wait for her in home economics, where the children were busy baking bread. He was getting tall as well as lean, with a long fringe and bright eyes, and the girls had looked up and smiled as he joined them to knead the dough. No need for him to follow a recipe. Vaughan often assisted his mother in the kitchen. She baked a marvellous teisen lap – sweet and buttery with a hundred raisin eyes. Standing beside her at the counter, he would observe the flour as it snowed. ‘Pass the whisk,’ then ‘pass the spatula,’ she would say and he would pass her the one, and then the other, quick, quick. He’d hear the regular clinking in the mixing bowl. Feel the dip of a spoon. Feel important, like those Sundays when he broke the skin on the rice pudding.
The smell of the bread baking in the classroom. A warm, homely, informal smell. It tortured him, the memory of it, weeks later, as the autumn term loomed. Not even the prospect of riding the railway out of Waterloo could lift his spirits in the slightest. How he despised his school, its cold dorms and colder housemasters (with names like Clotworthy), the plummy voices which droned on and on for what seemed to him like days, the frightening rifle target practice. To say nothing of the awful beatings. And indeed not one word was breathed of any of this during visits home. Only as an adult, nearing thirty, would Vaughan start to articulate what he’d been through, the damage done to him, confiding in a doctor in the Canadian hospital where he worked after immigrating. Until then, he’d supposed the fault lay somehow with him, and felt the ordeal far too shaming in any case to ever mention.
Before this doctor, Frank, he’d dared not address any man by name. ‘Sir’ and ‘Professor’, and later ‘Doctor’ had been the rule: ‘Dr Bowen?’ ‘Yes, Dr Green?’ or ‘Yes, Dr Smith?’ And as for calling his mother by her first name, well, perish the thought!
‘Call me Frank, Vaughan,’ the doctor had said gently. In 1976, if memory served him right. That year, and over the following years, Frank would lead Vaughan out of the darkest caverns in his mind, just as Anu would decades later.
Even now he felt twinges of regret at losing touch with Frank after moving to another city. He had always been bad at looking people up, asking after them. He’d learned of the doctor’s death in 2004 from a years-old obituary republished online. In 2004 he might have thought to call his mother in England with the news. Remember Frank? Dr Frank Coburn? Not a chance. By that time, she was always losing her train of thought.
The memory of mother’s teisen lap. Where had that come from? And why did it have to remind him – of all things – of his boarding school thrashings? Spoons and spatulas. Clotworthy. Frank’s kindly gaze.
Vaughan had always been dexterous – he could pick up and repair a shattered vase, shard by shard, repair a hand bone by bone. But the fragments of a mind – that was something else altogether. So hard to grasp and reassemble.
✲
Of the thousands of patients he’d treated down the years, several had left Vaughan puzzled. In his memory, two – a young woman, and an older man – stood out most sharply.
The young woman had come in one day with a forearm needing surgery. His assistant had recognised her as a recent patient, ushered her into his office and handed him her file. Vaughan proceeded to inspect the young woman’s forearm. According to the file, he had operated on her months before, but there was a problem. She had no scar.
‘Oh, that was my twin,’ the young woman said.
Were the two sisters so identical, Vaughan wondered afterwards, that they had developed the exact same low bone density in the forearms? Or, had the scar on one, throwing off their symmetry, incited the other to undergo her sister’s operation?
The older man – a driver in his fifties – had had his wrist crushed in a collision. The wrist had necessitated a big operation, lasting hours, but no sooner had the man’s anaesthesia worn off than he discharged himself, saying only, ‘I have an urgent flight.’ The sole address he’d left was a box number in a Chinese city. He had no healthcare insurance so Vaughan did not get paid.
Then, one day, eighteen months later, Vaughan’s assistant phoned him. ‘You will never guess what just happened,’ she said. Did he remember the man with the Chinese address? Well, he’d just left a bulging unmarked envelope for him with her, which she’d opened. Inside was the fattest wad of used $20 bills.
Was there anything more confounding, more impenetrable, Vaughan wondered, than the human mind?
✲
Dr Frank Coburn was Head of Psychiatry at the University of Saskatchewan and Vaughan a young resident surgeon at the campus’s teaching hospital. Vaughan was training under a British missionary whose specialty was the spine. The doctors Coburn and Bowen knew each other only in passing, as one more name on a door or a tag.
The life of the hospital was stimulating and purposeful and at times happier than the gruelling work and proximity to illness might suggest. Vaughan derived a deep satisfaction from mending bones spalled by illness and injury.
But his surgical prowess masked an inner turmoil – an early marriage, to an American student he’d met in Edinburgh, was failing fast. Her family had never approved of him; they refused to ascribe his quirks, as others did, to being British.
Fatherless from boyhood, Vaughan’s notion of a husband, or a prospective husband, had been formed by the movies’ square-jawed leading men. He asked himself where on earth these Bonds and Bogarts had learned their amazing insouciance, their worldliness, and presumed that the answer was the crowded and exotic bars he’d never set foot in.
He felt woefully underprepared for adult life. He tried to make sense of the 27-year-old breadwinner he had become, of the couple he formed with this young and bright American. Who was she exactly? The question weighed on him. His wife was an increasingly pressing source of bafflement: one minute she could be sitting on their sofa laughing, a beat later, tearing up. She seemed always to be telling him or pleading with him to listen. Vaughan would expend a tremendous effort to converse with her, but his remarks invariably fell flat, and when she complained he did not know why or what to say or do next. He wasn’t at all big on hugs – try as he might, he would never be Bogart to her Bacall. One frustrating evening, one of many, exasperation seized his wife and drove her to yell at him, ‘What’s wrong with you?’
What indeed? Vaughan did not know himself. He sensed himself unravelling. Some days he went out of his mind, or rather, he went further and further within it, turning this way and that, taking wrong turns, following thoughts that grew murkier, until he felt lost and afraid.
Over the months that followed, during which his discomposure steadily increased, he trudged through his hospital rounds, ate without appetite, slept fitfully, didn’t open letters, didn’t return neighbours’ waves, didn’t call on colleagues after shifts, went from slim and fair to thin and pale to gaunt and ashen.
In his weakened state the border between present and past became porous. Years of repressed mental struggles could no longer be contained. The tiniest reminder of his past caused Vaughan’s throat to contract abruptly: a stranger’s schoolmaster-like gait, or the overheard words of some argument between boys, at other times simply the scent of rain like the rain in Walton would trouble him no end. A few footsteps, a mouthful of words, a hint of a downpour – all it might take to set him off, even if they amounted to nothing more or in fact were only his imagination, which pained him all the same and just as much.
Vaughan had heard good things from his patients about Dr Coburn. But still he refrained from acting until one day after a long shift when the still lucid part of him telephoned up to the hospital’s fifth floor and told Coburn’s secretary that it was urgent.
‘I told the lady on the phone that it was for one of my orthopaedic patients,’ Vaughan explained to the psychiatrist. ‘The fact is, I’m the person who needs to consult you.’ And then, encouraged by a nod, he started to ramble. After a while his feeble voice trailed off. Eventually his unfocused eyes rose to meet the doctor’s short grey beard and thick glasses and high bald forehead.
‘You were miles away there, Vaughan.’
‘Dr Coburn?’
‘Call me Frank, Vaughan.’
✲
In Frank’s office silence was for Vaughan not a rebuke but an encouragement. In the privacy offered by its bare walls he could speak his mind. He at last unburdened himself, talking freely, taking a decade of nightmares and inexplicable headaches up to that room on the fifth floor. He described how some days he felt like he was inside a chill, black tunnel where he saw not the faintest pinprick of future light.
Frank tried him on tranylcypromine for the depression and lithium for the mood swings but far better than either of these, and without their side effects, proved to be the talking. Much of the talk returned to the English boarding school Vaughan had long attended. Vaughan described how he’d followed the other boarders’ example of putting on a brave face and voice at all times. If some of the classmates had teased him for his aloofness, many more had ignored him. With his slender, agile fingers he’d played first flute in the school orchestra – the regular rehearsals, along with the chapel and library, had kept him out of the way of most bullies.
But there had been no getting away from the masters.
‘They weren’t all rotten,’ said Vaughan. Those who taught the sciences, in particular, had found in him an able, responsive student. And often in the middle of geography he’d experienced a lightness rising in his chest like bread in a hot oven.
